Pinterest raises $100 million in funding: WSJ

Thu, 05/17/2012 - 01:55 EDT - Yahoo!

Pinterest, the increasingly popular online bulletin board, raised $100 million in a financing round that values the U.S. start-up at $1.5 billion, the Wall Street Journal said, citing people familiar with ...

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(Reuters) - Pinterest, the increasingly popular online bulletin board, raised $100 million in a financing round that values the U.S. start-up at $1.5 billion, the Wall Street Journal said, citing people familiar with the matter. The funding is led by Japanese e-commerce site Rakuten, with Pinterest's existing venture-capital investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, FirstMark Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners also participating, the report said. Pinterest could not immediately be reached by Reuters for comments. ...

The new funding round was led by Technology Crossover Ventures, a Silicon Valley-based venture-capital firm, a person familiar with the matter said on condition of anonymity because the deal is private.
The cash can help the Swedish music service bolster its U.S. business, which trails services such as Pandora, and launch in other countries such as Japan. The newest financing brings the value of Spotify to more than $4 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the funding round on Thursday.

JD.Com Inc (ADR) (NASDAQ:JD) announced last week that its financial arm, JD Finance, has raised 6.65 billion yuan ($1 billion) in funds. The three main investors who participated in the funding round, were China Harvest Investment, Sequoia Capital China, and China Taiping Insurance.

"Clinton Inc. is going to be the most formidable fundraising operation for the Democrats in the history of the country. Period. Exclamation point," is how on Republican lobbyist describes the Bill-and-Hillary show and as WSJ reports, in total, the Clintons raised between $2 billion and $3 billion from all sources, including individual donors, corporate contributors and foreign governments. They have raised more than $1 billion from U.S.